Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Like most serious readers, I experience periods when I'm unable to read anything. Nothing seems satisfactory. I'll pick up a book I've loved for years and the words will lie lifeless on the page. Not Beckett, not Chekhov, not even Nabokov's greatest invention, the intoxicating voice of Humbert Humbert, can trick me deviously into enjoyment. I seem to have lost all my readerly mirth, and even the fire-fangled fronds of Stevens's summer palms refuse to dangle down. Days like these, my swirling thoughts settle on the idea that I'm simply asking too much of fiction, of mere words arranged by the merest mortals. Why should a perfectly tuned sentence be expected to come as powerfully as a climaxing lover? Why should an enveloping image not satisfy unless its light is so brilliant it overpowers the sun by which we read? The doubts come unbidden and circle like melancholy birds that in evening's dying light glide downward to the realization that asking too much is exactly and entirely the point.We should always ask too much of art. Unless we ask too much, we are not asking enough. Unless we hold art to the highest possible standards, we will eventually find ourselves eating shit and calling it caviar.All I ask of a novel is that it blow my mind and alter my perception of the world. That's all. And I do not consider that too much to ask of a novel by a living American writer. Franzen and Chabon and Jennifer Egan and Junot Diaz don't do it for me (although I like Chabon a lot, and respect Franzen), but Gravity's Rainbow and Blood Meridian and William Vollmann's The Atlas and Annie Proulx's Close Range and even Infinite Jest do exactly that. Yes, even Infinite Jest, about which I have major reservations and which coincidentally concerns itself with exactly these topics of enjoyment and anhedonia.There's something else, too, that I'm looking for when I read: a creative originality that doesn't limit itself to content and form but reaches down to the level of the sentence and the word. Bullet my brain with a metaphor; sing me a sentence that sounds like a song. More than anything else, show me something I haven't read before. Not necessarily some surreal invention or outlandish transgression or excremental abjection--which have all been done to death, actually, and have been old hat since Bataille, older than Bataille's poop-smeared hat. All a writer really has to do is show me a shower head in a way that makes me feel I've never looked at a shower head before. Describe a human eye in a way that makes me see eyes differently for the rest of my life. That's what I want to read, a book that impresses me the way Ulysses impressed me on my second and third readings two decades ago, that impresses me like Proust, like Beethoven, like Picasso and Cezanne, like the ceiling of St. Ignazio di Loyola on a rainy day in Rome or the infinite inventions of Borges the Unblind, like the slow dying of the light at sunset over the Great Plains, like making love. That's the book I'm looking for, jonesing for. That's what I need to read.

One hundred years ago this evening, on May 29, 1913, the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) caused a now-legendary uproar in Paris. Although the extent to which it was a 'riot' has probably been at least a bit oversold, it's a centenary worth marking, preferably by listening to a good recording of the ballet.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Cliches are islands of excrement clogging the stream of consciousness. They are symptoms of lazy thought, thoughtless thought. Here are three of my least favorite contemporary American examples.Issue. I have an issue with this usage. Sometime around the millennium, Americans ceased to have problems. No, we didn't stumble into some trouble-free post-scarcity paradise where everything and everybody's free, weed's legal, and the word 'bush' is used only to describe landscapes and pubes. No, not even close. Instead, the usage of the word 'issue' to mean 'problem' apparently migrated from the 'helping professions' (a euphemism that will cheesegrate the eardrums of anyone who's read Robert Stone's great short story "Helping") into the everyday discourse of the corporate world. This sort of thing is far from uncommon; discourse-to-discourse migration is one way languages grow and change, and it's not something that ordinarily annoys me. With this particular usage, however, something a bit more cynical and devious than typical linguistic mutation is going on. A problem demands a solution; an issue, though, is something to be 'worked through' (during many long years of therapy, for example), dissolving the very concept of 'solution' in a cloudy solution of indefinite deferral. The usage is thus of great utility to the corporate world. In the latter part of the last decade, the big banks encountered serious 'issues' with credit default swaps, but since the collapse of the international economy did not constitute a 'problem,' no one really expected them to provide a solution. Having an 'issue' is a great way to avoid accountability and responsibility. It's a big problem.I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Of course you would. That's what worst enemies are for.I really wish people would stop saying this. It's never true. (And if you think it is, then the person you consider your 'worst enemy' probably isn't.)All nonmedical phrases containing the word 'heart.' The late Christopher Hitchens, in one of his finer drink-sodden moments, performed the thought experiment of replacing the word 'heart' with 'dick' in all the sentimental cliches that cluster like so many bloodclots around the circulatory organ. Consider: It's wonderful to be here in the dickland of America. Let's put our hands over our dicks and recite the pledge of allegiance. (Oddly enough, this probably was how oaths were taken in uber-patriarchal Old Testament times, a custom that leaves a trace in modern English in the similarity between the words 'testify' and 'testicle.') He wasn't the greatest boxer, but the kid had a lotta dick. I'm speaking straight from the dick. His speech was stirring and clearly dickfelt. We need to have a dick-to-dick conversation about that.Let's declare a moratorium on all three of these cliches. And I mean that from the bottom of my dick.

ABOUT THE TITLE

The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.

MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS

ULYSSES by James Joyce

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne

THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

MOBY DICK by Herman Melville

IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth

AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald

THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie

AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon

SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ

A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West

AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes

CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano

DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair

FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes

HUNGER by Knut Hamsun

INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino

JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot

L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola

MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch

ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly

POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain

SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger

THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James

THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann

THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard

FAVORITE POETS

Ovid

Dante

Shakespeare

John Donne

John Milton

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickinson

Charles Baudelaire

Gerard Manley Hopkins

W. B. Yeats

Rainer Maria Rilke

T. S. Eliot

Guillaume Apollinaire

William Carlos Williams

Hart Crane

Wallace Stevens

W. H. Auden

Dylan Thomas

Allen Ginsberg

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Anne Sexton

Pablo Neruda

Paul Celan

Seamus Heaney

John Ashbery

SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS

A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook

A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn

AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag

BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said

DISPATCHES by Michael Herr

EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann

FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass

FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes

IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert

INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis

LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair

MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer

POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt

REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama

SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia

STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence

THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon

THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud

THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann